Zero Cool

Peter Ross, a radiologist from America, is on a vacation in Spain for a month. He is suddenly between two competing parties over an autopsy! If he does it, one side will kill him. If he doesn’t, the other side will!

There are gangsters, the count, the professor and a host of others pushing Dr. Ross all over creation! All of them are after the Emerald of Cortez, the largest emerald in the world! It's a quickly paced story with lots of characters and locations. Sort of reminded me of a European "Maltese Falcon", which is funny because falcons are IN this story! Trained assassin falcons that can kill by following a scent placed on their targets! That was a new one for me!

Good story, with a really cool "Video Review" ending on the last two show more pages. I'll probably spend the rest of this summer looking for falcons circling above me... show less

A pulpy crime novel from Michael Crichton's med school, pseudonym days....not the greatest book ever, but twisty, pulpy, and fun. It has certain Crichton trademarks in the storytelling. While not his best by any means, I would read it again for kicks. Its a fun time if you don't take it too seriously and aren't looking for "quality" literature within its pages.

Another below-average and understandably pseudonymous early thriller from the late Michael Crichton. Stupid, fun, but stupid more than anything, shot through with plot hole after plot hole, attempting to cheaply mimic James Bond novels, particularly in regards to strange, damaged, and thoroughly unbelievable villains, but entirely without the flare and stylistically sweet prose of Ian Fleming.

Goofball radiologist Ross Something thrusts himself into a metaphorical chess game between the mathematical(! rhombus!) Professor and the dwarf Count (and yes, yes, yes, he lives in a castle and has a giant scarred mutant of a servant to guard him) because he singles out one babe on the beach and happens to be an American doctor. Often it feels show more more like a comedy than anything; the dialogue is constantly trying to be witty and hip. Far too often the characters seem to turn their brains off and ignore significant details that are just too goddamn obvious; e.g., “Hey, that lady just sprayed us with a cologne-like substance. Huh. Weird, it doesn’t go away. You know, my former boss trains giant eagles to murder people using perfumes to tag his victims, and thinking about it, that woman who sprayed us is my old colleague. Hey, there’s a giant eagle circling above us. Huh. Oh, well!”

I give it props for featuring the greatest surprise twist in the history of twists. Hey, if my already shady and paper-thin girlfriend was replaced with an effeminate man wearing a dress and cheap wig, I probably wouldn’t notice either!

Still, I wouldn’t mind if Hard Case Crime were to continue republishing Crichton’s long out-of-print early John Lange novels. $6 is already pushing it, but dear lord! $50? $80? that’s just absurd! No! no!

EDIT: I actually spoke with Charles Ardai, aka Richard Aleas, owner of the Hard Case Crime series, via e-mail after I read another old John Lange novel, and he informed me that he was in talks with Crichton about publishing more around the time of his death, but that his death put a definite stop to that ever happening. So goodbye, old Lange novels. Not likely to ever see the light of day again. That Easy Go slash The Last Tomb was a good one, too. Bummer.

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Michael Crichton wrote this under pen name for #hardcasecrime line.

Part Adventure type thriller, part thriller. Includes exotic travel and artifacts with an innocent radiologist who is dragged along for the the ride the full way

The only thing I don't get is the Spaniard on the beach with his warnings. Who was he ultimately with?

An easy read with a simplified writing style on behalf of Crichton. His prose here doesn't match his sci fi and thrillers written under his own name.

Sometimes frustrating because of unfairness of situations, it was clever enough and different from other hard case crime books I've read. Has an average star rating on Goodreads, but I'm going with three and a half Stars. Clever enough and kept me going.

The main show more character is rather simple and not that interesting, but the exotic players pulling strings behind the scenes keep it colorful. And apparently the police there are as lazy as most countries when it comes to homicide investigation.

it doesn't pause long, there's always something going on, so the page count flies by. Not fully a mystery, but it's not possible to tell what's going to happen next until the secrets are revealed to the main character. show less

Another early Crichton published under his John Lang pseudonym. As usual, it's vaguely entertaining and yet utterly implausible. He starts with a decent noir framework but then piles on a ridiculous number of plot twists that leave me wanting something simpler. The prologue and epilogue may have been added by him when Hard Case reissued this in 2006.

As described very well by other LibraryThing reviewers, this is a silly book -- a quick read, but even those few hours constitute a waste of time. I generally trust Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai's taste, but sometimes he does let me down. It is also curious that there is no indication given that this is a slightly updated version of the text, augmented by the contemporary "video interview" sections mentioned by Baviv. Were there any other changes made? The reprint is therefore suspect from a scholarly point of view, whereas in the past I have always felt I could trust Hard Case Crime's bibliographic integrity.

This was ok for what it was. A quick light pulp adventure. Some ok plot twists and lots of intrigue. If you want a pulp story and it doesn't have to be good, just scratch the itch. This is it.